Heather Zaveri studies family support and early childhood programs and policies. Her research interests focus on implementation science and cost analysis for family-strengthening studies designed to improve fatherhood and couples programs as well as teen pregnancy prevention and early childhood interventions for at-risk populations. She also provides evaluation technical assistance related to conducting rigorous evaluations.

Zaveri has contributed to several projects on evidence-based early childhood home visiting. She currently serves as deputy project director on a project analyzing the costs of implementing home visiting programs. For a cross-site home visiting program evaluation, she led design and planning efforts, conducted site visits, and provided evaluation training and technical assistance. Zaveri also contributed to research assessing child care quality rating systems.
In the family support area, she is principal investigator for the implementation component of a five-year evaluation of the Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood grant program. She also provides evaluation technical assistance and implementation guidance in support of teen pregnancy prevention programs funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Adolescent Health.

Zaveri joined Mathematica in 1999, then served as a Teach For America classroom teacher and corps member in the Washington, DC, public schools before rejoining the company in 2001. She has been published in the American Journal of Health Promotion, Preventing Chronic Disease, and the Journal of Women’s Health. She holds an M.P.P. from George Washington University, where she was named a public policy scholar.

Parents and Children Together (PACT) is a six-year evaluation of the Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood grant program to help couples build and sustain healthy relationships and marriages, and to strengthen positive father-child interaction.

This project builds on Mathematica’s study of the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP), and a complementary evaluation technical assistance project, to support evaluations of promising oregnancy prevention programs led by PREP grantees and develop curricula for underserved youth populations.

This national cross-site evaluation was designed to (1) examine the degree to which system change occurred, (2) document the fidelity with which the program models were implemented, and (3) identify implementation strategies and challenges.